10 ways to manage someone else’s clutter

Professional organizer Jeri Dansky, a finalist for the 2010 Los Angeles Organizing Awards, is among my favorite bloggers in the business. I’m very pleased to welcome her as a guest poster today on Simpler Living. Here are her 10 top solutions for dealing with someone else’s clutter.

Is a family member’s clutter driving you crazy?

If you share a living space with someone else — a spouse, partner or teenager, perhaps — then there’s a good chance that person has a somewhat different approach than you do to keeping things organized. Here are 10 suggestions for managing those differences.

Don’t thrown anything out — beyond things like the used napkin — without the other person’s agreement. Tossing someone else’s possessions is the surest way to destroy trust, making any future decluttering and organizing that much more difficult.

I work with people who know I won’t throw away as much as a paper clip without their OK. Maybe I’ve gotten permission to toss rusted paper clips, but not others; I’ll respect that.

2. As much as possible, go with everyone’s natural ways of doing things.

For example, if your partner always puts the incoming mail on the dining room table, perhaps you can put something on that table to serve as an in box. That’s much more likely to be successful than insisting that the mail be put on a desk in another room.

3. Continually look for ways to make organizing easier.

For example, are clothes and towels thrown on the floor? Consider providing hooks rather than hangers or towel racks; they’re easier to use. And consider providing a hamper in each bedroom for dirty clothes, if you don’t want them on the floor.

4. Let your kids have a say.

If you want your children to cooperate in your efforts to stay organized and uncluttered, get them involved in making some of the decisions. Let your children pick their hampers. Talk about the various ways to store all those Lego pieces, and see if your child has a preference. Let the kids go through their toys and select ones to donate to less-fortunate children; you may be surprised at how many they are willing to give away.

Note: This is not to say you don’t set some family expectations and rules!

5. Consider allowing all family members to manage their own spaces as they see fit, within reason.

If your partner has what you see as a messy office, or your teenager has a messy bedroom, can you just live with that? There are some limits to this approach, though, as mentioned in the next point.

6. Set some basic health and safety rules that everyone can agree on.

Used dishes and silverware need to be returned to the kitchen to be washed; food containers and used paper plates need to be disposed of. These are common-sense rules to avoid pest problems.

Similarly, items need to be stored to avoid creating fire hazards and other dangers. Doorways and heaters should not be blocked, for example.

7. Look for ways to manage common spaces (and common items, such as family bills) in ways that everyone can accept.

Remember that there are many ways to be organized. Your family member may need to have more things out and visible than you do; there are ways to do that and still have a reasonably uncluttered look. You may prefer to work on an organizing project for hours at a stretch, while someone else does better working in more frequent 15-minute blocks of time. Respect your natural differences, and look for creative answers that everyone can live with.
8. Watch your wording — and the way you say those words.

There’s a world of difference between asking, “Can we throw this old thing away?” and asking, in a neutral tone of voice, “Is this a keeper?”

9. Offer to help find new homes for things.

Many people feel better about giving things away if they know those things are going to people who will use them and appreciate them. If this is true with your family member, you might offer to be the one who posts things on Freecycle, takes the item to the post office or UPS to ship off to a distant relative, etc.
10. Bring in a neutral third party to help.

This could be someone who is a friend of the family, or it could be a professional organizer. Organizers are used to helping diffuse the tensions that can arise when family members don’t see eye to eye. And they know lots of ways to be organized, so they can suggest options you might not have considered.

Jeri Dansky is a professional organizer, helping people whose clutter is driving them crazy — and helping the mostly organized do even better. She works primarily with those in the San Francisco Bay area, but has clients around the world.

10 Responses

I was going to say yes until I saw the caveat about hoarders. (We’re working on that.)

Still, there’s a couple of good guidelines here I can pick up and use on just the plain fact that there’s nothing organized about the hoarding (i.e., it’s just not throwing stuff away and cleaning up vs. collections, etc.)

I heard my efforts that have started to make a turn in my daughter’s approach parroted in my grandson yesterday when he said, “Mom, we just can’t have this heap of papers here.” Cringe.

We’ve actually been employing or semi-employing most of these and they’re what’s got her working on the situation. It also helped to set two hours a week aside to dedicate to it. (Of course, I threatened to stop doing #1 too.) The last three are the only ones I haven’t used and daughter complains about 8 so it’s definitely food for thought.

I love the tip about putting hampers in everyone’s room. I found out that hampers without lids work much better than hampers with lids. Maybe it is just because I have teenage sons and they can only deal with something they can shoot their laundry into, but it works for us.

My husband and I share an office. I am a neat-nick – him, not so much. We have very different work styles and I have grown to accept that, but when the papers and “stuff” start to get unruly on his side of the office, I offer to “help him.”

We go through things and I help teach him to organize his paperwork better. Sometimes he is just too busy to do it and the mess doesn’t bother him the way it would me.

In the end he does appreciate the fact that i am “helping” him and not being critical of the mess, or telling him to “clean it up.”

1. Don’t throw out someone else’s stuff? That kinda’ goes without saying.
2. But, they keep throwing stuff on the floor. I don’t want stuff on the floor.
3. Done. But, stuff is still on the floor.
4. The kids say to leave stuff on the floor. I’m not sure how giving in to that is going to help?
5. You’re right. I can probably live with stuff on the floor. It’s their stuff getting walked all over.
6. That kinda’ contradicts the last point, but okay. Instead, I’ll point out how the stuff on the floor is a safety hazard.
7. Isn’t this just a restatement of points 2, 3, 4 and 5? Well, I guess you needed to reach 10 some way or another.
8. So, swearing and throwing things don’t help? Got it.
9. I offer all the time. No one likes the idea of relocating things from the floor to the trash can.
10. So, this was really an advertisements disguised as a blog post. I see. I feel cheated.

I liked these tips. Good reminders of how to get through a disagreement around what constitutes clutter and how to get rid of it. My husband’s clutter creates a lot of negative feelings for me. When I get upset it’s hard to think about what’s fair. I just want to through things away and I get frustrated when he doesn’t agree. I found Jeri’s tips help take the sting of trying to solve the problem.

Tip No. 3 — “Look for ways to make organizing as easy as possible” — has been especially useful in my house. I put small baskets in our living room for keys and other miscellaneous items earlier this spring. I have one, Mark has one — even our dog has one. It saves time and makes things easier for everyone.

Jeri’s first suggestion is a common-sense one, but people do things that violate common sense all the time. It’s a helpful reminder.

Panda (great name, by the way), I’ve run several guest posts from professional organizers, and none of them are advertisements. I didn’t hire one to deal with my own clutter, but getting an outside opinion from someone who isn’t emotionally attached to your stuff — friends, family or an experienced, qualified professional — can be very helpful. For someone who’s struggling with chronic disorganization (theirs or a loved one’s), it’s worth consideration.

I agree with all your tips. #2 reminds me of how as a newlywed, I was going crazy over my husband’s habit of leaving pocket change on the dresser. So I bought him a piggy bank at the next gift-giving opportunity and placed it on the dresser. The one I happened to purchase is stylish and adult and goes with our decor. So it’s easier on the eyes and more convenient than change lying around. What’s more, he loves the whimsical gift.

I’m guilty of not following #7 however. When things need to get done, I make time and do it the same day, the same hour even. My husband, not so much. So when time came to clean his closet out since he lost weight and majority of his clothes needed to be donated, I was on task, making lists, planning garage sales and thinking of donating. Him, not so much. It took about a week of nagging. Now I know and understand we just do things differently.

A shop is the first requirement on the list when we look for a new home. I’m a neatnik and my husband isn’t. We’ve done well for 43 years together because he has always had a shop. In our present retirement place, we don’t have a dishwasher, and the kitchen is 5×6 feet, but I don’t mind a bit — because I LOVE THE SHOP. The shop is his own place, with the TV and his recliner plus his ‘stuff’, and I don’t touch it unless he asks. Anything (other than clothes of course) that I find left around in the house, I put on the work table in the shop, and he can put it away or not as he wishes. I’m happy, he’s happy.

But what if you provide the space (closets and dressers) but the family member refuses to use them and instead keeps all clean clothes in folded piles and laundry baskets on the floor around the dresser, while dirty-but-not-ready-for-the-laundry-basket clothes on the chair and shoes that might get worn this week next to the bed?